Aspects of the present disclosure relate generally to wireless communication networks, and more particularly, to apparatus and methods for carrier aggregation (CA).
Wireless communication networks are widely deployed to provide various types of communication content such as voice, video, packet data, messaging, broadcast, and so on. These systems may be multiple-access systems capable of supporting communication with multiple users by sharing the available system resources (e.g., time, frequency, and power). Examples of such multiple-access systems include code-division multiple access (CDMA) systems, time-division multiple access (TDMA) systems, frequency-division multiple access (FDMA) systems, orthogonal frequency-division multiple access (OFDMA) systems, and single-carrier frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) systems.
These multiple access technologies have been adopted in various telecommunication standards to provide a common protocol that enables different wireless devices to communicate on a municipal, national, regional, and even global level. For example, a fifth generation (5G) wireless communications technology (which can be referred to as new radio (NR)) is envisaged to expand and support diverse usage scenarios and applications with respect to current mobile network generations. In an aspect, 5G communications technology can include: enhanced mobile broadband addressing human-centric use cases for access to multimedia content, services and data; ultra-reliable-low latency communications (URLLC) with certain specifications for latency and reliability; and massive machine type communications, which can allow a very large number of connected devices and transmission of a relatively low volume of non-delay-sensitive information. As the demand for mobile broadband access continues to increase, however, further improvements in NR communications technology and beyond may be desired.
Devices in a communication network, such as a base station (BS) or a user equipment (UE), may implement CA to increase data throughput. When implementing CA using multiple antennas, however, the varying input power for each component carrier and antenna may require LNA (Low Noise Amplifier) gain adjustment to maximize the signal-to-interference plus noise ratio (SINR) during transmission. To avoid interruptions to data reception/transmission, the gains of the low-noise amplifiers and/or power amplifiers may be adjusted between symbols. Given the number of antennas in typical devices and the limited bandwidth of the radio frequency front end (RFFE) bus, the modem may delay changing the gain of one or more LNAs when there are multiple LNAs which need to be updated. This delay may lead to degradation of data received and/or transmitted. Therefore, improvements in gain adjustment may be desirable.